- South Korea: Officials order evacuation after reported white phosphorus leak at US base
Source: ABC News
“South Korean authorities on Tuesday briefly ordered civilians to evacuate after what they described as a white phosphorus leak at a U.S. military base near the capital, Seoul. Officials in the city of Pyeongtaek urged nearby residents to move to a safe location and avoid skin exposure after the leak at the Osan Air Base was detected at around 5 p.m. They lifted the evacuation order several hours later, saying decontamination work had been completed, according to text messages sent out by the city. … In a statement, the U.S. 51st Fighter Wing did not mention a leakage of white phosphorus but said it established a 1,000-foot (300-meter) safety cordon around the base ‘due to a ground mishap and out of an abundance of caution’ to protect the base and the local populace. It said reports of a general evacuation of the air base were false.” (07/28/26)
- UK: Lyft and Baidu start testing robotaxis in London
Source: Engadget
“As it promised last year, Baidu has started testing its robotaxis in London along with partners Lyft and Freenow, the companies said in a press release. Baidu’s Apollo Go RT6 will start appearing in the UK capital (with test drivers aboard to start with), while Lyft and and Freenow, the German taxi company Lyft now owns, will take care of booking passengers starting next year. The trials are part of the partnership between Lyft and Baidu, with the aim of eventually deploying thousands of autonomous vehicles across Europe. To expedite that plan, Lyft acquired Freenow last year to take advantage of its large taxi network operating in the UK and Germany.” (07/28/26)
https://www.engadget.com/2224882/lyft-and-baidu-start-testing-robotaxis-in-london/
- Poll: SCOTUS approval hits record low
Source: CNBC
“The Supreme Court’s job approval rating among all Americans has hit a record low, as support for the high court by Republicans sharply dropped in 2026, a new Gallup poll has found. Just 33% of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing, Gallup found. That is a 6-percentage-point drop from the 39% who approved of its work in July 2025, which was the prior low-water mark for approval of the court. A record high of 61% of Americans disapprove of the court, according to Gallup, which has been polling the public’s approval of the Supreme Court for 26 years. That is up from a disapproval rate of 52% last September.” (07/28/26)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/28/supreme-court-approval-poll-gallup-republicans-trump.html
- Uganda: Regime declares country free of Ebola after last patient was discharged in mid-June
Source: Seattle Times
“Ugandan authorities said on Tuesday the East African country is ‘free’ of Ebola after the last patient was discharged in mid-June, a delicate milestone as the virus continues to plague a remote part of neighboring Congo. Uganda always insisted its outbreak was linked to the larger one that started in eastern Congo’s province of Ituri, which shares a land border with Uganda. … Confirmed cases in Congo have reached 3,262, its Ministry of Health said in an overnight update. Data by Congolese health authorities showed that 1,437 patients have died, in what officials have said is the fastest Ebola outbreak on record.” (07/28/26)
- KY: Beshear ups demand for McConnell health status
Source: CNBC
“Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) demanded that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) verbally address constituents and demonstrate his ability to serve or resign his seat in a blunt letter sent to the senator and his staff. It’s been more than 40 days since 84-year-old conservative stalwart McConnell has appeared outside of pictures released by his office after being hospitalized. His lengthy absence and past health scares are fueling speculation about his capacity to serve. … Under Kentucky law, Senate vacancies — which can occur due to resignation, expulsion or death — are filled by a special election.” [editor’s note: Beshear should schedule the special election on grounds that, if McConnell is even alive, he has constructively resigned – TLK] (07/28/26)
https://www.axios.com/2026/07/28/mcconnell-health-update-beshear-demand-letter
- Powerful quake hits southern Japan, deaths feared in shopping mall blast
Source: Reuters
“A 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Japan’s southern Kumamoto prefecture on Tuesday, knocking out power to thousands of homes, rupturing roads and leaving some trapped and others presumed dead inside a partially collapsed shopping mall. Speaking to reporters in Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said authorities were still assessing the full extent of the damage in the area, which was devastated by a deadly quake a decade ago. … Around 300,000 people have been instructed to go to evacuation centres, and hundreds of soldiers have been deployed to help with rescue operations as aftershocks continued to rumble in the area, on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Multiple people were unaccounted for after a chimney collapsed at a Nippon Paper Industries factory, broadcaster NHK reported.” (07/28/26)
- From Biden’s Potemkin Presidency to Trump’s Potemkin War
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Jim Bovard“In eighteenth-century czarist Russia, a fake village was built by a Russian governor named Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin to deceive Catherine the Great about the condition of the peasants she ruled. ‘Potemkin Village,’ according to Time magazine, ‘signifies any deceptive or false construct, conjured often by cruel regimes, to deceive both those within the land and those peering in from outside.’ In Washington a few years ago, the media partnered with the Biden administration to concoct a Potemkin Village to deceive Americans about President Joe Biden’s faltering fitness for office. … Donald Trump is not as physically feeble as Joe Biden, though he is a shadow of his vitality in his first term. But Trump’s delusions on the Iran War seem as bad or worse than any imaginary vision that sent Biden wandering off stage at the wrong time.” (07/28/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/from-bidens-potemkin-presidency-to-trumps-potemkin-war
- Free Sam Tunick — and Make the Privacy Tool He Used the Universal Standard
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp“[Sam Tunick] was asked for a PIN to unlock his phone for an illegal, warrantless, and unjustified search. He gave the agents a number … a ‘duress code’ which, upon use by an agent, not by Tunick, erased all data on the phone and performed a complete factory reset rather than unlocking the device. Now, Tunick finds himself facing trial on charges of violating 18 US Code §2232, ‘Destruction or removal of property to prevent seizure.’ Two problems with the charge: First, Tunick didn’t destroy or remove anything. The CBP agent who stole his phone did. Second, the law only applies to ‘authorized’ searches and seizures. Absent a warrant issued by a court ‘upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,’ no such ‘authorization’ exists.” (07/28/26)
- Minority Report: FBI Seeks AI for Political Watch List
Source: Reason
by Daniel Boguslaw“The FBI office in charge of maintaining the terrorist watch list is seeking an artificial intelligence system for pre-crime policing, according to procurement documents obtained by Reason. The request for information for vendors, posted by the FBI’s procurement division in March, solicits potential bidders for a project that would supercharge the Threat Screening Center (TSC) with new predictive AI capabilities—just as its focus moves from Islamist terrorism to domestic dissent. … The terrorist watch list maintained by the TSC is by its very nature a pre-crime entity—it seeks to prosecute crimes before they occur.” (07/28/36)
https://reason.com/2026/07/28/minority-report-fbi-seeks-ai-for-political-watch-list/
- Libertarianism and Poverty
Source: ProSocial Libertarians
by Andrew Jason Cohen“It’s never been clear to me why anyone would think that lowering the tax burden on wealthy people is more important than lowering it on poor people. I think we should lower the burden as much as possible on everyone, consistent with maintaining a just society. … Consider the mortgage deduction: why is it good to give home owners a tax break but not good to give home renters a tax break? What justifies that deviation? I’m not offering an answer; I want us to take the question seriously.” (07/28/26)
https://prosociallibertarians.substack.com/p/libertarianism-and-poverty
- Don’t want data centers spiking your power bill? Let them build their own grid
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Joseph Verruni & Travis Fisher“Kentuckians are right to worry that data centers will drive up their electric bills. When a single facility demands as much power as Owensboro, someone pays for the new plants and wires that serve it. The General Assembly is still arguing over how to make sure that someone isn’t the residential ratepayer. There is a simple answer, and Kentucky law currently forbids it: let large consumers build their own grid.” (07/28/26)
- The $80 billion healthcare loophole disguised as charity
Source: Washington Examiner
by Jeffrey Mazzella“In 1992, Congress created what’s commonly known as the 340B program in order to help safety-net hospitals and clinics stretch limited resources to serve low-income and uninsured patients. By requiring pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell prescription drugs at steep discounts to qualifying hospitals and clinics, the logic went, the 340B program aimed to keep medications accessible and affordable in underserved communities. Nearly 35 years later, however, the program bears little resemblance to what Congress had in mind, and there’s no reliable way to know whether patients still benefit from its growth.” (07/28/26)
- The Obstruction Doctrine: What Level of Governance Is Appropriate for AI?
Source: Cato Institute
by Kevin T Frazier“The proper delineation of authority between the federal government and the states has often been the subject of controversy in the debate over AI policy. Proponents of both approaches reference the constitutional clauses that support their claim. The reality is that this issue, as with many things in AI, is not a neat list of discrete policy matters. Instead, there is a clear mix of AI policy issues that require national attention—those that are the exclusive domain of the states and the issues that can be taken on by both the federal government and the states (or a collection of states).” [editor’s note: Or, you know, all governments could keep their grubby hands off – TLK] (07/28/26)
https://www.cato.org/blog/obstruction-doctrine-what-level-governance-ai
- Elbridge Colby and the Art of Defending the Indefensible
Source: The Bulwark
by Joseph StiebIt’s one of the worst jobs in Washington: Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, is tasked with explaining Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy to the public. But you could just as easily say he volunteered to launder Trump’s bellicose, bizarre acts by finding an intellectual coherence that isn’t there. The 46-year-old grandson of former CIA Director William Colby and graduate of Harvard and Yale is a born-and-bred courtier to the powerful. He boosted lies about the 2020 election and spent the subsequent four years angling for a position in the next Republican administration. He seems to have convinced himself that Trump would be a vehicle for executing his grand vision of focusing American foreign policy on China while distancing the United States from, in his view, parasitic European allies and a hopelessly troubled Middle East.” (07/28/26)
- We’re Being Plunged Into Dystopia When We Could Be Living In Paradise
Source: Caitlin Johnstone
by Caitlin Johnstone“All this innovation that’s being poured into finding new ways to conduct mass military slaughter, to surveil and control our entire society, to restrict and manipulate the flow of information, to create artificial scarcity for products that people need, to create artificial demand for products that people do not need, to compete with rival corporations in order to turn billionaires into trillionaires — none of that needs to be happening. Humanity could be using its creativity and cleverness to make the world a better place instead.” (07/28/26)
- Futile Drug-War Murders
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger“Maybe some good will come from these military murders. Maybe the American people will finally come to the realization that the drug war is nothing more than a decades-old, ongoing, never-ending deadly, destructive, and corrupt racket that has brought nothing but death and the destruction of liberty and privacy, while making the federal government ever more powerful. Maybe — just maybe — Americans will finally, after decades of drug-war failure, pressure U.S. officials to terminate the abomination of the drug war.” (07/28/26)
- Inside Meta’s Bet on the Dignity of Work
Source: Townhall
by Salena Zito“Until recently, Lanyia Brooks worked as a custodian in a data center, where she spent her days maintaining the facility while watching tech professionals build the infrastructure around her. Brooks said that perspective changed completely when a data center technician noticed her work ethic and remarked that she ‘worked too hard to be just working as a custodian,’ and sent her a link to a specialized career training program. Despite waiting two anxious months to hear back, Brooks was accepted, conquering her fears to take her very first airplane flight to Indianapolis for the opportunity.” (07/28/26)
- Planting the Seeds for Progress
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Keli‘i Akina“Like many local business owners, Hawaii’s farmers and ranchers have to deal with rules and regulations that often make it harder to run a successful enterprise. They also share the same concerns about the high cost of housing and how it affects their ability to attract and retain employees. This year, with encouragement from my colleagues at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, the state Legislature took steps in the right direction to help.” (07/28/26)
- Is the US Ready for Radical Change?
Source: Common Dreams
by CJ Polychroniou & Alexandra Boutri“The US is the richest country in the world, yet an international outlier on many measures. Among industrialized nations, the US spends a lower percentage of its GDP on public social expenditure, has no universal healthcare system, union density is at an all-time low, and the average American’s standard of living is in decline, as ‘nearly half of US households can’t make ends meet.’ Of course, delusional President Donald Trump continues to say that the US is the ‘hottest country in the world.’ Is the US, however, ready for radical change?” (07/28/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-ready-radical-change
- The Eleven-Inch Foot
Source: Law & Liberty
by Amy Peikoff“On July 14, the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act by a vote of 308 to 117. The bill would impose Daylight Saving Time year-round, nationwide, and President Donald Trump has promised to sign it. It now sits in the Senate, where Majority Leader John Thune has voiced misgivings about a federal mandate, and Senator Tom Cotton has asked that it never reach the floor. The ensuing debate has been conducted entirely in terms of policy: circadian health versus evening commerce, school-bus-stop safety versus after-work golf. Those are pertinent questions, and they have a clear answer. But there is an antecedent question that no one in Congress appears to have asked: where, exactly, does the federal government get the power to legislate noon away from the sun?” (07/28/26)
- Dynamic Pricing Bills Can’t Ban Demand
Source: The Daily Economy
by Benjamin Jarmon“Preventing prices from adjusting to demand doesn’t create more stadium seats. It just hands more of the scarcity premium to resellers.” (07/28/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/dynamic-pricing-bills-cant-ban-demand/
- The Fed Is Expected to Hold Rates. The Rules Say It Shouldn’t
Source: The Daily Economy
by Matthew Schaffer“The Federal Open Market Committee is expected to leave its policy rate unchanged at this week’s meeting, with CME FedWatch assigning close to a 65 percent probability that the FOMC will maintain the current target range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent. For the second meeting in a row, that expected outcome is at odds with the guidance provided by the leading monetary rules. This raises the question of whether the new Warsh-led Fed is prepared to follow through on its promise of delivering price stability.” (07/28/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-fed-is-expected-to-hold-rates-the-rules-say-it-shouldnt/
- Sorry, data center haters. You’re on the wrong side of history.
Source: USA Today
by Gene Marks“In the 19th century, thousands of miles of railroad were built, and the opposition to them was intense. These weren’t organized environmental groups. They were conservationists, local residents, business owners, landowners, parents, farmers, Native American tribes and taxpayers enraged at how their elected leaders were spending their money. Many in the 19th century didn’t want trains rolling through their backyards. Many today don’t want data center complexes in theirs. You can’t blame them. Where would America be today without its railroads? … More than 150 years later, little has changed. Today’s data centers are yesterday’s railroads. They are the infrastructure behind everything that powers our economy. Railroads moved freight. Data centers move information and make modern commerce possible.” (07/28/26)
- Trump is starving the machine that creates America’s socialist revolutionaries
Source: Fox News
by Liz Peek“Socialism is metastasizing like a cancer throughout our country. Though collectivism will inevitably fail, because it always does, it is already causing significant damage to our nation’s political and social fabric. It must be stopped. It is not enough to defeat Socialism at the ballot box. The factories producing this infection — the far-left faculties of our colleges and universities — must be starved of taxpayer money. Thankfully, the Trump White House has taken measures to start that process.” (07/28/26)
- DEI By Any Other Name is Still Just as Sinister
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Wanjiru Njoya“As the New York Times finally begins to question whether progressives went ‘too far’ with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), it is worth reiterating that DEI policies are based on false and destructive premises, and for that reason they should be abandoned altogether. Rather than debating whether DEI has gone ‘too far,’ we should continue to oppose this sinister ideology in its entirety.” (07/28/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/dei-any-other-name-still-just-sinister
- Backing a Losing Horse
Source: Law & Liberty
by Rachel Lu“Postliberals seem determined to disprove the old adage that hindsight is 20/20.” (07/28/26)
- Ron Paul Liberty Report, 07/28/26
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“New Report: Trump’s Deadly Boat Attacks Did Nothing To Halt Drug Trade.” (07/28/26)
- Better in Person, 07/28/26
Source: Freakonomics
“How Harlan Coben Keeps Readers Up Until 4 A.M.” (07/28/26)
- Rising, 07/28/26
Source: The Hill
“Robby Soave gives his radar on public opinion of the Iran War, as a new poll shows that Americans are still hesitant to trust Democrats despite having mixed feelings about the war.” (07/28/26)
- Capital Record, episode 313
Source: National Review
“When Economic Convenience Enhances Loneliness.” (07/28/26)
- Cato Podcast, 07/28/26
Source: Cato Institute
“Happy 60th Birthday, Now Pay the Bill.” (07/28/26)
https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-podcast/happy-60th-birthday-now-pay-bill